It’s the town where the beat won’t stop. And one man, in particular, makes sure that the bands keep on coming. Rosanna Greenstreet meets the Kingston shop owner on a musical mission...
Having famously brought Ed Sheeran to Kingston before he became a global superstar, Jon Tolley has serious clout on the music scene. Between last September and November alone, he arranged for Nile Rodgers, Suede and 1975 to perform at PRYZM, the largest nightclub in the town.
Pinning him down for an interview isn’t easy: when not booking bands or working behind the counter at Banquet Records, in Eden Street, this music man is frequently at the Guildhall where he sits on the borough council. Eventually, however, I find myself in the empty shop next to Banquet, perched on a tiny stage while Jon sits on a speaker surrounded by boxes of records.
“This used to be a greasy spoon, then a Korean restaurant, and now it is extra gig space and somewhere we can process our deliveries without clogging up the shop floor,” he explains, his casual, rather rumpled appearance belying his status as a local politician. When he says that you won’t see him at meetings in a suit and tie, I believe it.
Jon, 41, grew up in Chessington, went to Tiffin School and began working at Banquet after university. He was at Loughborough, a uni more associated with sport than with music.
“I think it shaped who I am,” he reflects. “There wasn’t much of a music thing going on, so I started DJ-ing and putting on an indie night. When I came back from university, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I began working part-time at the record shop because it was fun and I could still go skateboarding. Twenty years later it’s still fun and I still go skateboarding!”
Jon bought the shop with his business partners, Mike Smith and Jane Unwin, 13 years ago.
“The owner ran it into the ground, so we bought it off him for a quid and took on all the debt. It was about to go bust – I hadn’t been paid for nine months. We had little stock because we didn’t have enough money to buy any, but we knew that if we had a cash injection we could do okay. We took it over because we didn’t want it to stop, and then we put the gigs under the umbrella of the shop, so they weren’t just a hobby.”
Over the years, Jon reckons, Banquet has arranged 2,300 gigs in Kingston, including at least 10 with Weybridge band You Me At Six, as well as those Ed Sheeran appearances at the late lamented Hippodrome in 2011.
“We did two gigs with Ed. Both sold out, obviously, so 2,600 people watched him in Kingston. We’ve got a reputation now – people are coming to us. If you look at Nile Rodgers & Chic, for example, we didn’t go knocking on their door.
“There are different reasons why bands want to play. Some want a lot of money, some just want to do something cool for fun, some want to promote their new album. So it’s trying to understand what the band wants most and then making them an offer.”
Banquet venues include Bacchus, in Union Street, The Fighting Cocks in Old London Road and Kingston College. Since the Hippodrome closed last July, PRYZM has also become a go-to option, along with both the Rose Theatre and All Saints Church, where the logistics have proved somewhat challenging.
“The Rose is not a gig venue – it doesn’t have a proper PA and a mixing desk – so we’re turning a space not designed for live music into gig space. All Saints we started using in 2014, especially for gentle acoustic acts: Michael Kiwanuka played there, as did Lucy Rose. But last year Rick Astley came and we’ve even had rock bands such as Twin Atlantic. It’s fun to put bands in a beautiful old church instead of a sweaty club where the kids would be jumping around or crowd surfing.”
When Jon first booked PRYZM, there were teething problems. Existing licensing restrictions meant that everyone had to show ID to prove that they were over 18 – a custom which, it turned out, was honoured only in the strictest observance.
“It sounds sensible,” concedes Jon, “but you are then turning away 70-year-olds because they don’t think to bring ID. The 18-30-year-olds are used to this culture, but when Suede played we had to turn away dozens of people in their 40s and 50s.”
As a councillor, Jon is well versed in the intricacies of local government.
“Our aim was to ensure that the council knew about Banquet’s needs and then to get that onto the agenda of the decision makers. We had to go through PRYZM, as they are the licence holders – we just use the venue. So they made the case and it won. The change came about because we’d created public awareness of just how important these gigs are – they are brilliant, brilliant things!”
It was the cancellation of Kingston Carnival in 2014, on safety grounds, that initially drew Jon into politics.
“It transpired that the council thought the event would bring 5,000 people into the town. Now, I’d booked Neville Staple from The Specials, who’s a legend, but he wasn’t going to attract 5,000. I presented a petition to the council and said: ‘If any of you can show me how to get 5,000 people to come and watch this guy I’ll give you a job because 500 would be a miracle!’”
Having fought and lost a local by-election as an independent candidate, Jon stood as a Liberal Democrat in 2015 and won. The carnival was reinstated the same year.
“The Kingston Conservatives helped make that happen, so I don’t want to pretend that the Lib Dems saved it,” he insists. “When councils get things wrong, mostly they just don’t know the issues. I see it more and more. You have stretched departments, with officers doing their best with limited resources to make decisions based on the information that’s in front of them, and sometimes they really don’t have the facts.”
Jon has to go: a local duo, Young Romance, is releasing an album on the Banquet label and there is a gig with 80s pop star Tiffany to organise. Last February, Kingston was allocated £90,000 through the Mayor of London’s Cultural Impact Awards to ‘create a live music circuit connecting venues, artists and promoters, and build on the area’s rich music heritage’. Few would doubt that a lot of that heritage is down to the hard work of one Jon Tolley.
Not that he is taking the credit. The modest muso would never regard his endeavours as ‘work’, and he certainly isn’t in it for the money.
“It’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve actually made any money. For a decade I was getting by on significantly less than the minimum wage,” he says, when pressed.
“I see the good that we give back to the community from being on the high street. When you shop at Amazon, you might save a day or a quid, but what have you sacrificed? The reason I do this job, and have been doing it for 20 years, is that I don’t want to be part of that culture. I don’t live for anything material – apart from maybe some records.”
For upcoming gigs go to www.banquetrecords.com/events
